Climate change – gagging the skeptics

The environment is something that journalists have to be very much aware of, especially when it comes to climate change.

At a recent lecture at Cardiff Journalism School, the head of school Justin Lewis described how people only started realising what effect we are having on the planet as little as 20 years ago. Since then, there was a great deal of scientific controversy – the scientists and the sceptics were given balanced airtime, with reporting levels relatively low.

Then, in 2006/2007, change started to happen. At the hands of overwhelming scientific evidence pointing definitively in the direction of climate change being real, the balance shifted in favour of the climate scientists. The debate was closed. End of story.

Except that wasn’t the end of the story. The recent scandal over leaked climate change emails left the reputation of climate change journalists scarred. A huge step back was taken. According to Lewis, 99% of climate change scientists believe that humans are causing climate change. That’s compared to just 26% of the general public.

Another interesting statistic – back in 2006, climate change was the 10th most covered topic in science and technology news. Tenth.

As a result of all of this, I typed “climate change” into the search of several news providers to see what’s happening right now. The results:

Again, the same story. More interesting, though, is their article Climate change is not a matter of faith which sums up the feelings of a lot of people getting frustrated with the skeptics and apparently increasing levels of public scepticism:

“…the issue has gone beyond whether we should simply ‘believe’ in climate change. It is not a matter of faith. The evidence for anthropogenic global warming is there for anyone to study. If sceptics are to merit our attention, they need to come up with an equally powerful counter-argument.”

So, everybody’s picking up on what’s happening at least. Though climate change is apparently accepted as a cause of blame for certain things that happen, as in the disappearing gardens, there is also a trend of references to still justifying climate change. Like the ‘acceptance’ that it exists never happened.

One story has the power to change an awful lot. One man who said he thought the MMR jab caused autism prevented thousands of children from being vaccinated. One story about dodgy scientists has caused people to question climate change, providing a very convenient get-out clause for people who don’t want to accept that their habits might have to change to save the planet.

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One of the main problems I come across when I talk to people is that like you say they are not convinced by man made climate change which is fairly ridiculous. The scientists, ie the people who know better, mainly agree we are at least to small scale to blame. However the issue that no-one seems to want to address is simply the depletion of energy sources, whether bad for the environment or not! If people wish to continue their lifestyles they are simply going to have to change the way they think about energy full stop and to be frank anyone who thinks otherwise is just stupid! With peak oil predicted to have occured by 2030 this is closer than most people think.

[…] good thing? Certainly, if climate change does start to become more accepted – as discussed in Climate change – gagging the skeptics – we will almost certainly have to reduce our levels of consumption. And that is not […]